Testimonial of a Survivor of Felling
I looked up into the sky, and there I saw it, Armageddon on wings. Sorath was waiting, I had been gone three days on this hunt and I was certain she’d throw me out in the snow for being gone so long, much less returning empty handed. But then the sky caught fire, wings blotted out the sun. Then the heat, though the thing was far above me, the pine needles at my feet burst into flames. My hair caught fire and my face erupted in pain as my bow string caught fire and snapped over my shoulder and leaving a stinging angry line from my ear to my chin. I ran then. Through trees as old as any fey this side of the veil, each erupting into showering sparks of splitting popping pine. The forest screamed as its boughs buckled beneath the heat. At that moment I imagined I had somehow been swallowed into some great demon’s gullet, and I believe it was at that moment that I went well and truly mad. I noticed a steady stream of obscenities being shouted by hoarse, scorched lungs. It was not till I slipped and smashed my already bleeding face into a rock that I realized that the gibbering fool screams were my own. Then the thing twisted in the sky and bellowed in some ancient tongue my mind reeled from, its voice was a thunderclap. Suddenly I heard only the steady chime of pixie bells ringing and when I touched my ears my hand came away red and wet. I began to laugh then. As I writhed there in the melted snow, burning acorns raining upon me, the whole of Benthanisal, home of the woodland elves of Sho’Athar, the mountain sized oak tree at the center of all fairie folk of this world and the next, transformed at once from ancient incarnation of nature into inferno. The tree let loose an unholy wretched wail as it’s trunk snapped and the world broke, the searing timber fell crushing Sho’Athar, my legs, and all elven kind beneath it. This I felt more than heard, as the ground quaked beneath my mad coiling body. And then the thing was suddenly gone from the sky. Emptiness where it had been, it’s absence drawing all the flame so quickly toward it that my burning breath too was ripped out of me leaving me to the blessed darkness of what I was sure was my demise. But I woke. The snow fell from me as I stirred. It took hours to climb from beneath Benthanisal’s outermost branches. And by the time I crawled into the gem encrusted caves beneath Seelieput, I had spent all the grace afforded me in all my years. The gnomes told me of Sorath and our child, ashes now, and then I fell into an oblivion of sorrow, yet somehow salvaged sufficient wits to pen this tale. Night is the scream issued forth by the life tree as it was sundered by flame, the scream that had reached through my already deafened ears into my soul, and day is the immeasurable suffering of life without love, legs, or sound, and always, always the foreboding dread that the sky might once again be blotted out by Hate.